Читать книгу Why Rome Fell - Michael Arnheim - Страница 60

Diocletian’s persecution of the Christians, formalized by an edict issued in 303, was no exception to this rule. Eusebius, the Church historian, admitted that there was no persecution of Christianity in the early part of the reign. (Eus. HE 8.1.1-6.) And Diocletian’s ire was first directed (in 302) only against the Manichees (Manicheans), a Christian sect with a good deal of support in the Eastern part of the Empire as well as in Egypt and North Africa. The Manichees were suspected of forming a pro-Persian fifth column, important at a time when a revived Persian Empire under the Sasanians posed a major threat to the Roman Empire.

But what was Diocletian’s motive for then turning on the mainstream Christians? It had nothing to do with religious dogma or belief but was a response to Christian refusal to serve in the army or, once enlisted, to participate in the sacrificial ceremonials of the imperial cult.

The thorough research of Professor Candida Moss has revealed the falsity of the age-old Christian tradition that Christians had been mercilessly and systematically hunted down, persecuted, and executed by the Romans for 300 years until this was halted by Constantine. Candida Moss puts the Great Pesecution in context in a passage quoted in Chapter 10. (Moss 2013, p. 129.)

Why does this matter? It is important in relation to Constantine’s later favoring of Christianity. (See Chapters 3 and 10.) In fact, the “pagan” religions of the Ancient world, including the old Roman state religion, were normally tolerant of one another. They were “communal religions”, a term I coined in my books Is Christianity True? (1984), The God Book (2015) and God Without Religion (2018). This term meant that a person’s religious identity was automatically bound up with their national, social or communal identity. Belief, dogma, or creed did not come into it. Unlike Christianity, which is a “creed religion” (another term I coined), communal religions mostly had no definite beliefs, only ceremonial and rituals. It was taken for granted that every nation had its own religion and its own gods, so one would respect foreign religions. Rome was exceptional in being (by ancient standards) a huge cosmopolis that attracted people from all over the Empire and beyond. These people brought their religions with them, so there were numerous foreign cults with their own gods, priests, and temples active in Rome. On the communal principle, these were generally tolerated even though a number of them had long been separated from their communal roots and were simply what are sometimes described by modern writers as “oriental mystery cults.”

Foreign cults, such as those of Isis, Cybele (the Magna Mater, or Great Mother), and Mithras (an all-male cult, very popular in the Roman army) were all welcomed in Rome. Cf. Peter Garnsey’s remark, discussed in Chapter 10, that the Roman religion was “…disposed to expand or absorb or at least neutralize” them. If that were so, why were these religions allowed to flourish with their own temples and their own priests at the heart of the Roman Empire? It was not under the Roman pagan religion but under Christianity that they were closed down and, especially after 391, banned, with the destruction of many varied pagan temples, statues, and images and the murder of a number of pagan priests. (See Chapter 10.)